The project was designed to investigate the knowledge structures Americans employ to represent their marriages, and the role of such structures in generating marital goals. The investigation thus bears on a problem central to our understanding of human cognition and behavior: the origin of goals. Preliminary analyses of interview data reveal that at least seven different types of knowledge structures enter into interviewees' conceptualizations of their marriages: metaphors, prototypes, exemplars, key episodes, key words, images and folk theories. Goals for marital change may be derived from the process of change, such as "growth," "investment," or "deepening of commitment" involved in a metaphor; preservation goals and heuristics for monitoring their preservation may, likewise, be derived from states, such as parenting the other spouse, keeping the relationship within boundaries, or not stagnating, which pertain to the metaphor an individual is employing. Knowledge structures other than metaphor may also entail goals. Future analysis will pursue the issues of how knowledge structures differ in function, and how they interact. A final result of preliminary analysis is the identification of at least two loci of shared cultural knowledge. While metaphors for marriage in the interview data seem to vary endlessly, they are reducible into three classes of culturally appropriate metaphors for this domain: economic, travel and bonding metaphors. Similarly, key words such as "commitment" and "fulfillment," used in a variety of ways by different interviewees, seem to have an underlying conceptual structure which is implicitly understood by all users.